Was The Wizard of Oz Cursed? Film Historian Debunks Wild Rumors (Exclusive)

• With Wicked, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, now in theaters, PEOPLE takes a look back at the 1939 classic
• For years, people have claimed the fantasy film starring Judy Garland was cursed
• Oz expert and author John Fricke explains the problems on set while debunking rumors

The Wizard of Oz is one of the most influential films of all time. It’s also one of the most mysterious, due to widespread rumors that it was somehow cursed.

During the course of filming the 1939 classic about Kansas teen Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) who’s swept away to a magical land by a powerful tornado, multiple accidents and mishaps occurred. People often point to those accidents as proof that something was off.

Margaret Hamilton, the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West, suffered second- and third-degree burns during one scene. Her stunt double, Betty Danko, was hospitalized after an explosion.

The dog that played Dorothy’s faithful Toto was injured when someone stepped on it. And actor Buddy Ebsen, the original Tin Man, had to drop out of filming because he had a frighteningly adverse reaction to the makeup.

Oz expert and historian John Fricke, the author of The Wizard of Oz, The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History and The Wizard of Oz, An Illustrated Companion to the Timeless Movie Classic confirms those incidents.

But he chalks up many of them to the filmmakers’ innovative moviemaking. “They were doing stuff that had never been done before and attempting stuff that had never been done before,” he tells PEOPLE. 

Indeed, both Hamilton and Danko were injured during complicated and dangerous sequences. “There wasn’t any pre-thought of, ‘Let’s be careless,’ ” he says.

After Hamilton was burned during a scene where the Wicked Witch disappears on the Yellow Brick Road in a cloud of smoke and fire, she was recuperated for six weeks. When she returned, she refused to film a scene in which her character rides a broom with smoke coming out the back. 

Danko, Hamilton’s stunt double, filmed the scene instead. She was supposed to push a button to release smoke from the back of the broom, and when she did, “the broom blew up,” says Fricke.

“Betty Danko went flying in one direction. The hat went in another direction. The broom went in a third direction, and she ended up in the hospital.”

The ambitious makeup application was also problematic for original Tin Man Ebsen (who’d later go on to star in The Beverly Hillbillies). He reacted badly to the aluminum dust in the makeup, according to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

“One night in bed I woke up screaming. My arms were cramping from my fingers upward and curling simultaneously so that I could not use one arm to uncurl the other. My wife tried to pull my arm straight with some success, just as my toes began to curl; then my feet and legs bent backward at the knees. I panicked. What was happening to me? Next came the worst. The cramps in my arms advanced into my chest to the muscles that controlled my breathing. If this continued, I wouldn’t even be able to take a breath,” Ebsen wrote in his memoir The Other Side of Oz, per The Academy. (Jack Haley went on to star as the Tin Man.)

Fricke says “90 percent” of what filmmakers attempted “gave us a classic motion picture.” The other 10 percent that went wrong unintentionally “has been inflated to 98 percent — and now it’s been fabricated and lied right into a legend.”

He bristles at lurid stories that he says are simply not true. According to Time, Garland’s third ex-husband, Sid Luft, claimed in his memoir that the actors who played the Munchkins would go out drinking and “would make Judy’s life miserable by putting their hands under her dress.”

“The Munchkins did not sexually abuse Judy Garland,” Fricke says. “One of them asked her out to dinner and she said no. That was as far as it went.”

After the film’s 50th release in 1989, a rumor spread that an actor who played a Munchkin died by suicide on set — and many claimed to be able to see a shadow of the body in a scene. But Fricke also puts that rumor to rest, saying, “There is no hanging Munchkin at Tin Man’s cottage. This is the kind of stuff that gets perpetuated.”

“We’re living at a time when anything is believable,” says Fricke. “It’s become the fabric of our day-to-day life. But we know the truth.”